Region Economy rebalance

[Terises Jr.]

Urm, city lord will command larger troop.. And militia in the city will be enlarge.. That fun.

Maybe hard to start a Rebellion after this..

[Zakilevo]

This new re-balance is mostly increasing gold of cities (large ones) and mountains (except ones on Dwilight) without increasing their population meaning they are just getting more gold without spending much on food. As Terises Jr. said, this will make big cities even harder to assault. There are cities with over 4k gold income meaning they can recruit militia up to 25k CS. With enough food, it will be almost impossible to besiege the cities...

As for people now commanding 600~1000 CS, that is mostly due to lack of players. Since we don't have as many players as we used to, everyone is just getting a lot of gold.

[Anaris]

This new re-balance is mostly increasing gold of cities (large ones) and mountains (except ones on Dwilight) without increasing their population meaning they are just getting more gold without spending much on food. As Terises Jr. said, this will make big cities even harder to assault. There are cities with over 4k gold income meaning they can recruit militia up to 25k CS. With enough food, it will be almost impossible to besiege the city...

We have some ideas about how to deal with this, too. The rebalance alone can't fix all our woes.

[Zakilevo]

We have some ideas about how to deal with this, too. The rebalance alone can't fix all our woes.

Good. I was worried about increasing gold while not increasing population. It would be very problematic  :-\

Also, with this rebalance, it seems we are reverting back to the previous rebalance - making badlands useless again. Is the dev team thinking about this as well? It would be too disadvantageous for realms with a lot of bad regions.

[Dante Silverfire]

It would be too disadvantageous for realms with a lot of bad regions.

Um...it should be.

Remember, the balance isn't intended to be made based upon current realm borders. If your realm gets screwed, well that sucks, but this is about long-term game balance.

Namely, I just think we should implement something and start adjusting from there. We can suppose what will happen all we want, but until we actually see how dynamics change, we'll never know for sure. If your personal strength goes down, you're gonna complain. If you're personal strength goes up, you're probably gonna support it.

In general though, it doesn't matter what change is made. A change just needs to be made. Primarily, basing the stats actually on something real. That's the whole point of this as far as I remember.

[Zakilevo]

Values which were assigned randomly by the dev? Does anyone know how rich medieval port cities were compare to cities close to rivers and lakes?

[trying]

I thought this rebalance was suppose to tie food production to region size along with a few other factors and gold to population.

[Gustav Kuriga]

Values which were assigned randomly by the dev? Does anyone know how rich medieval port cities were compare to cities close to rivers and lakes?

These new numbers aren't random, they're being applied via a formula. Gods, I don't know how many times I or other devs have repeated this...

[Anaris]

It is not our intention that there be any useless regions, in the long run.

We are working on ways to make badlands regions—and other regions without much gold or food value—still worthwhile. It's not a trivial problem.

[Anaris]

The population values are still pretty arbitrary, as are the region sizes and types.

We're looking at changing some of these to bring the values more in line with what we think is good gameplay.

[Zakilevo]

These new numbers aren't random, they're being applied via a formula. Gods, I don't know how many times I or other devs have repeated this...

Based on my understanding, the numbers that came from the formula aren't random. But the formula uses the values assigned in the economic page (available to see when you are a courtier) + region type (coastal, lake, midland).

[Zakilevo]

The population values are still pretty arbitrary, as are the region sizes and types.

We're looking at changing some of these to bring the values more in line with what we think is good gameplay.

I think the main problem is that when Tom originally created islands, he never though of balancing regions to begin with. You can see that from region distributions across EC and Atamara. Especially, EC where there are wealthier regions in the south while useless badlands in the north.

Rebalances that came after that increased the gap between the north and south mostly. Of course with the implementation of the coming resource system - which I highly doubt will come within a feasible time frame - this will mostly fixed.

[Terises Jr.]

We have some ideas about how to deal with this, too. The rebalance alone can't fix all our woes.

So we have to wait 2 month for rebalance . And maybe 2 year for that 'some ideas'..

[Anaris]

So we have to wait 2 month for rebalance . And maybe 2 year for that 'some ideas'..

Yes, you do. For a free game, whose development team—coders, editors, admins, GMs, and the rest—all volunteer parts of our free time entirely out of our love for the game.

So unless you have a few hundred thousand dollars to a) pay a few of us to quit our jobs for a couple of years and work full-time on BattleMaster, and b) then continue to pay us until we can find new jobs better than working at a restaurant or an ice-cream store, I suggest you keep complaints about how long it takes to get this stuff done to a minimum.

[Kwanstein]

If you can tell me why, in an objective way, this is wrong, I am willing to listen.

Personally, I have not been able to see any meaningful reason why it would be bad to boost the overall gold income, but I am perfectly willing to listen to potential problems it might raise.

Gold is almost pointless now. My characters have a total of ~10k gold pooled, with another 13k family wealth -- and this is after less than a year of playing. They can't spend their gold on units, because units cost too little. They can't spend their gold on recruitment centres, because their regions already have lots of recruitment centres and adding more would be pointless. They cannot spend their gold on militia, because their regions aren't threatened, so militia for them would be pointless also.

Their choice is either to spend their gold on pointless things, or else to continue saving the gold for no reason. As a result, I no longer care for gold other than as an E-Peen metre, and not really even for that. That is why I was hoping that gold supplies would decrease, as a decrease would be a step towards making gold valuable again.